Coins

All Part of the service

February 2004, Volume 41 No. 2

2004 is well and truly upon us and with it comes the new round of meetings, congresses, conventions and shows. Our itinerary is already filling up – by the time this magazine goes on sale the first “York” of the year will be behind us and the COIN NEWS team will be on the way to Switzerland for the International Coin Convention in Basel. Immediately after that we have the first London Coin Fair of the year on February 7 and then we’ll be heading overseas again for the Dublin Coin and Collectables show on the weekend of February 21-22. March sees us at a variety of Medal Fairs but in early April we are straight back in with the coins at Harrogate on Friday 2 and Saturday 3 and then in Newcastle the following Day at the Royal Station Hotel (followed by a very long drive back to the Westcountry!). After that we are heading across the water again – heading to Valkenburg and the “Maastricht” show and it’s new venue on the weekend of April 23-25. We haven’t even thought about our summer programme yet!

In addition to the shows we are attending there are dozens more on offer in the coming months – the regular Birmingham show at it’s new venue of the Manor Hotel is held on the second Sunday of every month, Leeds (Morley) show continues to go from strength to strength on the last Sunday of every month and the Commonwealth Institute coin fair is now firmly established as a regular and popular event. The number of “smaller” provincial shows across the country also continues to grow with regular fairs the length and breadth of the land. Of course there aren’t just the fairs that coin collectors can attend, the auctions, both in London and across the country, continue to “draw in the crowds” and the various Numismatic Societies that we are in contact with always have interesting and varied programmes to suit all tatse – this month alone you can hear “More about Tokens” in Harrow; learn more about “Roman Provincial coins” in Bournemouth, take “A Guided tour of the Bank of Scotland Archive” in Edinburgh or delve into the world of “Irish Military Money” in London – and that’s just a small sample of what our “Calendar” has to offer this month.

All over the UK and beyond the hobby of numismatics continues to grow, maybe not at the pace some would like (although certainly faster than some of the cynics would have us believe); every month it seems another show starts up, another website devoted to coin collecting is launched, another society is formed, unfortunately too many of these don’t get past the first event or first meeting. Too many web pages lie unvisited, too many talks go unlistened to and too many fairs go unattended – why? Simply because the people that need to know about them don’t, it’s as simple as that. How can fair organisers expect people who’ve never heard of their show to turn up? How society organisers expect huge numbers of collectors to attend the meetings if those collectors have no idea that a society even exists in their town? I’m not talking about the necessity of taken out full page colour adverts (although if anyone wants to that’s fine by us!) but I am talking about organisers of any event, indeed anyone who has anything they think will be of interest to our readers (a new book, a new website, anything) getting in touch with us. Tell us about it and we’ll tell the coin collecting world.

We are here to provide a service to you our readers, to help you get as much as possible out of their hobby –we will do that by telling you what is going on, but only if we’re told first.

Fair organisers, society secretaries, authors, dealers, auctioneers - if you want us to tell our readers about your fair/meeting/book/latest offer/next auction date we will do our best to do just that, but we’re not psychic, you have to tell us first.

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